Re: Revelation 22:13

Re: This is exactly how things are designed to work

>>"If you have userland code running with admin privileges that does that and malconfigures the system for you automatically that is where the problem lies"

Well, out of the box GNU/Linux systems normally would. That's the thing. Configure GNU/Linux to not accept any old DHCP server and it wont be vulnerable. But the same is true of Windows. If the criticism is that default settings are not adequate, then that applies to most GNU/Linux distros just as much as Windows. If the defence is that you can configure it more securely so this isn't an issue, then that too applies to Windows.

Re: If Only Google Could Get A Handle On Their Own Security Problems

>>"Might that correlate more strongly with size? Android has 80%+ of the market :. it makes sense that it would have 9x% of the attention. Windows suffers in the same way on the desktop."

Yes. Though that does give me ironic flashbacks to arguments in the mid-2000's when people here would hold up the quantity of Windows malware against the quantity of GNU/Linux malware and when I'd point out the difference in userbase size and user sectors (server vs. home), they'd go "nuh-uh. It's nothing to do with how many people use it".

I contacted my hosting company over a similar thing, asking if it were actually a phishing attack. They confirmed that no, it wasn't and yes, the domain name ICANN was using was legitimate even though it sounded like a scam. I was unimpressed.

I'll be holding on to my AV for a while longer. Did Google say who should be in charge of whitelisting? Was it them, by any chance?

Re: Archtech Take back control

>>Also, Ukrainians don't speak Russian - but Ukrainian which has not little differences. Despite the forced russification, despite the deportation of whole ethnic groups. Saying Ukraine is "naturally Russian" if just like saying Hungary (or Northern Italy) should be still part of the Austria,

But we're not talking about "Ukrania", we're talking specifically about the Crimean peninsula. An attached land mass which was previously part of Russia and which was ceded to the Ukraine (such as it was under the USSR) after WWII. Russia has not invaded anywhere else, only this specific peninsula which was a separate region (both administratively and geographically) from Ukraine as a whole.

>>And I wonder what those agreeing with Crimea invasion would say if the US invaded Cuba

If the Cuban people overwhelmingly were US emigres and wanted to be part of the USA, then they should be so. I'm not sure that's the case, though. Crimea is about half the size and a fifth of the population of Cuba, incidentally. Unlike Cuba, which is a country, the Crimean Peninsula is a ruled territory. A better analogy would be if the people of Northern Ireland voted they wanted to be part of Russia and the welcome they gave to Russian troops arriving was called an invasion of England.

Re: Take back control

>>If you shrug your shoulders over the annexation of part of a soverign state(1) just because you think "some"(2) of the people there "might"(3) be happier ruled "elsewhere"(4)

Corrections to some of your weasel wording:

(1) An autonomous region attached to a sovereign state which snaffled it up after WWII.

(2) "Large majority"

(3) Are known to by reputable surveys and the fact that by referendum the people there didn't want to be controlled by the Ukraine.

(4) The country that the Crimean Peninsula used to be part of and which the people there identify as.

>>"Also since when did ignoring a dictators illegal actions EVER make any of them more inclined to follow the rule of law?"

(1) Putin has majority support in Russia. You might not want to believe that but he does. Standard of living has risen dramatically in his time in office.

(2) Strawman because what I was saying was that most European people don't want confrontation with Russia. Putin's feelings on our lack of desire for a war are immaterial to whether we want it or not. (We don't).

>>"Yes, god forbid would should respond in kind to russian military build up."

If NATO forces are surrounding Russia at key strategic points right on its borders, it's a little whimsical to affect that its a defensive and reactive measure. Building missile bases in Poland (against the wishes of the majority of Polish people) is provocation, not defence.

>>"No, we should just tuck our tails between our legs and run off like typical EU cowards"

Does that actually work on people? Calling people cowards for not wanting to act aggressively towards our neighbours? I'm sure there's some hyper-testosterone'd uneducated types out there that will leap up to attention if you tell them they're cowards, but I don't think it's going to work on El Reg forums.

Re: Take back control

Some European leaders were. Many European people were shrugging and saying the people of the Crimea want to be part of Russia anyway and maybe we shouldn't be building up massive military forces around Russia in the first place.

Re: Is there any reason...

Yes. The relevant laws that Hillary may have contravened were introduced after Colin Powell's private email server. You can't and shouldn't retroactively try someone for laws that weren't in place when an act was committed.

Re: But Wait ...

Re: @Doug S @Ian Michael Gumby - 'shy voter' theory

Pence is a born again evangelist Christian (i.e. not the nice affable kindly type, but the righteous and judgemental type who is a devout supporter of Israel on anything they wish) who has left little doubt that he wants to confront Russia in the Middle East ("hello WWIII"). Hilary is no better. At this point, there are no good options

Re: I sense political meddling.

>>"For me, the fishy part is this: they claim that they had to build special software to only index and examine his emails"

Public: How did you search the emails?

FBI tech: I did a Bash script with some regular expressions.

Public: Regular what?

FBI tech: It takes like 30 seconds, it's scripting.

Public: Scripting?

FBI tech: You just have to adjust a few parameters because we want to make sure we get all the aliases covered and this email server used a new header format too and...

Public: What????

FBI tech: Fine, I "wrote a program that reads emails"

Preston: "Why would they need to write special software to examine the emails?"

This is answerable by translating tech into public speak and then back into tech, imo. Public speak really only has two ways of understanding any technical process: {Wrote a Program | Didn't Write a Program}.

Re: Speaking from experience

I recall giving a presentation at a conference and someone in the audience asked a question about integrating with a Capita project. I off-handledly described Capita as a "a rolling disaster" and half the audience spontaneously broke into applause. I wasn't trying to be funny or dramatic, it was just a matter of fact statement. Clearly it resonated though.

I am sure there are some hard-working engineers at Capita. I suspect they spend most of their day pleading for better requirements or adequate resources. Or else just browsing job sites.

Re: US LAW

I believe they were using the murder sentence as an example of irrationality - 12 consecutive lofe sentences. Seriously?

Though it can work as an example of how the US court system is about vengeance rather than justice too. I mean what the Hell is the point of imprisoning someone for 12 life sentences? It blatantly doesn't work as a deterrent as even one life sentence (or even a few years) would act as a deterrent to any rational person. And it sure as Hell isn't about redemption or rehabilitation. Such sentences exist only as a means by which US society can express its desire for punishment. It is a country with a very strong streak of Biblical righteousness to its character. They love to see sinners punished!

Re: MS could buy Belgium

Architecturally, the 10x line isn't really any different to its predecessor. Pascal is just die-shrunk Maxwell. I'd be far mor interested to see what AMD's Vega would look like in this. Polaris brought a number of new features that are interesting over Pascal. , it's just that it was aimed at the larger mainstream market than the high-end. Vega should be the same but high-end.

Re: "People like ultimate laptop and we wanted to keep that title..."

"Posix"? Seriously? POSIX is pre-object orientated and antiquated. It was designed to try and bring some much needed consistency to the mess of different UNIXs out there. That doesn't mean Windows should follow it. It's not suitable for Windows at all, given that the entire Windows environment is Object Orientated and pretty much every interface in the OS is exposed as an object. Why the Hell would POSIX be an advantage for Windows?

Re: Hybrid Raid SSD

>>Gosh, what an absolutely AMAZING coincidence. We've only ever encountered that problem for, what? The entire lifespan of Linux minus the few years it took for MS to realise it was taking its lunch?"

Is it a coincidence that new and recent hardware doesn't have Open Source drivers for it, yet? I mean you seem to be hinting at some AMAZING (tm) conspiracy, but Open Source has almost always lagged behind for new hardware support. You can't really expect MS to hold off on buying something until there are Linux drivers.

Re: Load of bollocks

Re: The big question It's a PC, I don't see any reason it wouldn't.

>>"You never know - one day MS might write a bios/UEFI lockout that works."

Microsoft is not UEFI. UEFI is a consortium of big players from Samsung to AMD to Intel to Microsoft and a number of others. And Secure Boot could be set to lock out other OSs right now but it isn't and MS's own requirements for Windows certification mandate that a physically present user be able to turn it off. Secure Boot serves a valuable purpose - it blocks a number of real world malware attacks that subvert the boot stack. Things that actually exist. It hasn't been 'failing to keep out Linux' all this time, you can just enter the UEFI menus and turn it off with a keyboard if you want. Or have we reached a generation of GNU/Linux users who now regard that as complex subversion?

Re: No.

>>"Buy once, play forever - that's the ONLY model I wil accept. Once they have you on pay-per-play hook for 0.1p, it won't be long before the beancounters will start hiking the price every month or so to milk ever more money out of you. Zero tolerance of this is the only way to prevent that from happening."

But the value of my music depreciates and there is new music coming out all the time. A subscription model is a cost effective way for me to keep cycling my music as I stop listening to old songs that I've heard a lot and start listening to new songs that are still fresh to me.

>>"Fortunately I now have mp3s or flacs of every single piece of music of every composer or band I ever liked"

This is probably the case given you're arguing for buying outright rather than subscription models, but just checking that you paid for all of those rather than pirated, because that sounds like a huge investment.

Re: RE; LEDs

I've got three similar cases. One is a computer case with a painfully bright blue power LED. It's not too bad when it is continuous, but if I put the computer into sleep mode it blinks continuously. And it shares a connection with the power cable (not sure how they manage the sleep detection with that) so cannot be easily disconnected. It's bright enough that I can see the room flicking on and off in blue from another room.

Second case is a portable, battery-powered speaker. Same deal - it blinks on and off constantly which makes it useless for the bedroom. Turning it to face the wall obviously spoils the sound quality a little and duct tape to the front of a speaker is not my preference.

Finally a speaker beneath my TV set. Happily that one can be duct-taped over.

Re: @I guess that's economists for you

>>"Really? When The Git was in Big School, logic was taught by a philosophy major."

If I were to list the number of occasions I had seen someone assume that because they understood logic and had decent reasoning skills, they could make pronouncements in any field by abstracting a few gross principles and finding a pleasing conclusion, we would be here for a very long time.

>>"Unsurprising really since logic has been an important part of philosophy since at least Aristotle's day over 2,000 years ago"

Case in point, Aristotle loved his idea of his five elements to explain matter. And justified it with assumptions and logic based upon them because the conclusion seemed elegant to him.

The arrogance of someone who thinks their logic skills from Philosophy classes allow them to dabble usefully in a field as complex of economics is staggering. Reminds me of a manger who used to do some coding and thus gets the basic principles. You'd think it would be good but it's so long since they did it and their understanding is so rudimentary that all it really leads to is someone thinking they understand it when they're really just making loose generalisations that elide a lot of complexity. Much like this article.

Re: Errrm

>>"How many of the people reading this have a job that even existed 100 years ago?"

Lots of us. However, unlike a hundred years ago, we had to spend the first 23 years of our life just preparing to do those jobs. In 1916, you could walk out of school at the age of twelve and find some sort of employment. A few years later it was raised to 14 years of age but still the point holds. The level of training and complexity required to compete with automated or semi-automated industry rises every year. This article chooses to reference history when convenient to its argument and disregard it when it isn't. You'll need to spend a quarter of a century on this planet soon before you can get a decent job. Maybe you already do.

One might think this means more work for teachers and professors, but actually modern technology is altering teaching too. You can learn from online training packages and book a slot to talk to a tutor who lives a hundred miles from you and services a hundred or more students. Universities with good reputations are using those reputations to look into delivering their product - education and degrees (which I class as separate items) - world wide, ultimately driving out local competitors.

So where is the tipping point? We are heading towards a future where there are only two jobs: being a celebrity or being the person who presses the button that makes everything happen. I imagine looking back at this article in twenty years time and having a very good laugh. Assuming I can afford the Internet connection and my licence for using the Internet.

Re: General uptick in Villainous Russian stories lately.

>>"Natwest froze Libya's accounts?"

No, Natwest is freezing Russia Today's accounts (a news agency). They notified the UK arm of Russia Today (which employs about sixty people) that they would be locking the account on the 14th of August. So RT has that long to get the money out of there and set up all the staff payments, expenses, invoices, standing orders and direct debits and all that mess. It's a big hassle just for you or I to do that. It's much worse for a news agency. And no reason has been given and Natwest have said they refuse to give one. Though they may backtrack on that due to backlash. Shutting down news agencies is not a good thing.

General uptick in Villainous Russian stories lately.

Definitely noticed this. Russia Today also had their UK accounts frozen yesterday as well. What this suggests to me is that the US and UK are preparing for the possibility of conflict with Russia. We saw a similar rush of stories in the build up to NATO attacks on Libya. I really hope this isn't the case but increasingly over the past month I'm seeing such stories and accusations.

Democracy...?

So let me get this straight, the CIA are accusing Russia of informing the electorate of what their candidates actually said and this is what is called "interfering"? Isn't that a good thing from the point of view of the voters?

Re: Why spend billions?

Better approach is to attach the politicians to a pulley and crank and then place them near to sum of money, preferably in a plain brown envelope. You can then extract energy from the continuous attraction of the politician towards the cash. N.b. Use Tory or New Labour politicians for greatest efficacy. Under no circumstances uses UKIP members as they degrade the money pile through a process known as Brexitation.

Re: 42?

Re: Nobody Doesnt Die

>>"By what metric would it be "the most meaningful goal possible" without resorting to circular logic"

That's a pretty easy one. By the metric of safe-guarding the survival of the species. If humanity is wiped out, our ability to attribute meaning to things goes with it. A self-sustaining colony on another planet is one the most powerful things we could do to safe-guard our species. And you can't get to a self-sustaining colony without going through a dependent colony (at least not any time soon).

That's how it can be defined as "the most meaningful goal possible". As Carl Sagan said: The dinosaurs are no longer with us because they didn't have a space program.

Re: Musk seems to be losing it

Yes. Another potential loon here. But there are unanswered questions about property rights. If I go to Mars as a colonist, can I stake out an area of it and have it be legally mine? Like colonists have in olden days (only with the difference being that this time the land really is vacant rather than displacing people already living there).

Re: Opposite of what you would expect?

Re: This famous science fiction short story seems to sum it up nicely...

I think an even more insightful old sci-fi novel would be Tik-Tok. In it there is a US military project that so much money has been sunk into (it's an aircraft carrier) that nobody dares to cancel it. So each successive head of defence ploughs even more money into it in an attempt to make it viable. Despite the fact that it's a colossal failure from a strategic point of view.

It's a good novel, albeit old. About a domestic cleaning robot that kills someone and from there follows the natural progression through crime, to business to politics. The details of the technology in the story have aged and become out of date, but the politics seems to have not changed a bit.

True in many ways, but counterpoint - the heroes who save the day are a group of four small farmers who nobody takes seriously and whose 'noble ancestry' consists of one of them having a great grandfather who allegedly cut the head off a goblin and two others belonging to a family notorious for causing trouble.

Re: Troll gets tossed under bridge

I suspect he rather over-estimates his importance to the day to day running of the company. I wouldn't be surprised if efficiency went up during his absence. Fewer demands for arbitrary statistics and updates. ;)